The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which sliding sport has a competitor lie feet-first and face-up on a tiny fibreglass sled with no braking system, steering only by flexing the runners with the calves and shoulders, and reaching around 140 kilometres an hour?

Question 2

Which endurance sport, the core of the Nordic skiing tradition, has competitors propel themselves across rolling snow terrain over distances up to 50 kilometres, using either a striding classic style in set tracks or a faster skating style on groomed piste?

Question 3

Which sport launches a competitor down a steep ramp to take off at the lip and soar as far as possible down a shaped landing hill, the result combining the distance flown with style points from five judges for flight and landing?

Question 4

What is the name for the ski jumping technique, universal since the early 1990s, in which the jumper spreads the tips of the skis wide apart while keeping the tails close, forming a shape that traps far more air than the old style of holding the skis parallel?

Question 5

Which Swedish alpine skier, a specialist in the slalom and giant slalom who never raced the speed events, won a record 86 World Cup races in the 1970s and 80s and took two golds at the 1980 Lake Placid Games?

Question 6

Which city, then in Yugoslavia and now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, hosted the 1984 Winter Games, remembered for Torvill and Dean's Bolero and for a British and warm reception, only for its bobsled run and other venues to be shelled and used as fighting positions in the war less than a decade later?

Question 7

Which sport packs four or more skaters together for a mass-start dash around a 111-metre oval marked out on a hockey rink, with frequent crashes, blocking and disqualifications, and medals sometimes decided by a skate blade thrust across the line?

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About The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports

The Winter Olympics gather the world's snow and ice sports into a single fortnight every four years, and this quiz covers the Games, their hosts and the disciplines around them in eighty questions. Each describes an edition, a champion, a sport, an event, a piece of jargon, a venue or a famous moment, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story or the record behind it.

The first pack is the foundation: the Games themselves and their 1924 start at Chamonix; the sports of figure skating, alpine and cross-country skiing, the biathlon, ski jumping, the bobsled, luge and skeleton, long and short track speed skating, curling, ice hockey and snowboarding; and the moments everyone knows, the Miracle on Ice, Torvill and Dean's Bolero, Eddie the Eagle, two Games at Lake Placid, and Norway at the top of the all-time table.

The second pack fills in the detail. The champions, from Sonja Henie, Eric Heiden and Lidia Skoblikova through Bjoern Daehlie, Marit Bjoergen and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen to Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun White and Yuzuru Hanyu. The host cities, Squaw Valley, Innsbruck, Sapporo, Sarajevo, Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang, Beijing and twice-natural St Moritz. And the events and terms, the super-G, the halfpipe, the moguls, the Nordic combined, the team pursuit, the curling hammer, the ski-jump K-point, the refrigerated sliding track and the vanished compulsory figures.

The third pack is history and controversy: the Kerrigan and Harding attack; the 2002 pairs judging scandal that ended marks out of six; the McLaren Report into Russian state doping; the Jamaican bobsled team; the Eddie the Eagle qualification rule; the Battle of the Carmens; the klapskate and the ski-jumping V-style that each rewrote their sports; the death of the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili; Sidney Crosby's Golden Goal; the Kamila Valieva doping case; the hand-built Cresta Run; the sport of bandy; the Winter Paralympics; Sweden's Vasaloppet; the military patrol event that became the biathlon; Grenoble 1968; the Ailsa Craig granite in every curling stone; ski flying; and the neutral label Russia's athletes competed under.

Every answer is a single name, and the wrong options are always names of the same kind, so the game is recognition rather than recall. A few myths get cleared up: Norway, not a bigger country, leads the all-time medal count; ice hockey and figure skating both began at the Summer Games; and the 1988 Jamaican team crashed rather than triumphed. Because a photo of an athlete or a named venue usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral shot of empty equipment or an unlabelled arena does not, and every fact has been checked.